A Widow's Curse (5 page)

The only key to a locked secret was silence, and a patience I had barely acquired over the course of agonizing years.

So I sat, staring at Hek's back, counting each exhaled breath. The rain drummed on the tin roof and the eaves dripped. Distant thunder whispered over the hills. I could hear the clock on the mantel in the parlor clicking away seconds as intensely as the blood thumped my temples.

“Well,” Hek said suddenly, turning my way, “some things you bury, forget, and you think they're gone. I haven't thought about that night in a good long while.”

“I don't believe it would ever come to my mind at all,” June agreed, “if Fever didn't dig it up.”

“
That night
?” I heard myself say.

“I made a promise, boy,” Hek growled. “I can't say a thing about it. Sorry.”

I fought an impulse to rip the table in half,
mostly
because I knew he wasn't finished. Maybe he'd tell me right then, or maybe he wouldn't, but he had much more to say on the subject.

“A promise is a promise.” He sipped his coffee, leaning back against the countertop.

“You know we'd tell you if we could,” June added.

Even after a lifetime of running into stone walls exactly like this one, I still wanted to take a sledgehammer to the kitchen. I loved June and Hek, and I would have helped them rebuild the room once I'd demolished it, but the satisfaction would have been well worth the trouble.

“You know something about this coin.” I pressed my lips together.

“We do.” June sniffed.

“You know who sold it.”

“Did I hear you say something about a Welsh saint?” Hek cleared his throat, still sleepy.

So he hadn't been entirely asleep when I'd been talking to June. He'd overheard at least part of my conversation.

“Saint Elian.” Maybe I could lead them down some sort of alternate path that would at least parallel the story they wouldn't tell me.

“That's interesting, don't you think?” Hek looked me directly in the eye.

That was a hint. I just didn't know what it was supposed to mean. I stared back at him.

June distracted herself by clearing away my plate. The clatter of it seemed loud compared to the drip and splatter at the window nearby. She turned on the water in the sink and began to wash the plate. She spoke with her back still to me, her voice rising over the noise she was making.

“He means your great-grandpa being Welsh and all.”

I actually twitched, as if someone had kicked the leg of my chair. “Damn.” I said it before I could think.

June's head shot around, face scowling.

Hek was awake instantly.

“Boy, you better know you can't talk like that in
my
kitchen!”

“Sorry.” I held up both hands. “Really. I just—sometimes I can't believe how slow I am.”

June's expression softened immediately.

“Honey, you know you're better at seeing things that aren't so close to you.” She even managed a smile.

She was right. I suffered from a malady familiar to most children of odd families: a kind of emotional farsightedness. I could pierce the veil of a stranger's psychology with three well-chosen sentences, but I couldn't see the foibles of my own troubled mind even if they were silver and shiny and handed to me on my own front porch.

“This coin has something to do with Conner.”

June went back to her washing; Hek sipped coffee and looked at the rain.

My great-grandfather, Conner Devilin, had been born in Wales but had been apprenticed to a silversmith in Ireland, where he was accused of murder. He narrowly escaped prison and came to America. When he died at the age of eighty-six, most of his things were sold at auction and brought a sizable bit of money, some of which came to me for my university education.

One of the few things that hadn't been sold was a silver lily he had made in Ireland. Maybe he had also pressed the odd coin, though how or why that would be was certainly unfathomable to me at that moment.

“Strange family,” Hek mused, still staring out the window, “the ones over there.”

“In Wales,” I prompted.

“Uh-huh.”

“Strange in what way?”

“Mean. Crazy.” He set down his coffee cup. “I remember your father got a phone call when Conner died.”

June laughed, drying the plate.

“That Conner was a pretty ornery old pistol all by himself.”

“He was that,” Hek agreed. “Did I ever tell you that he killed—now I'm going back fifty years or more—he killed a bear….”

“A small bear,” June amended.

“Killed a bear,” Hek went on, as if June hadn't spoken, “by hitting it in the head with a rock. That's the truth. The old bear, standing on his hind legs, come up on Conner while he was walking down the mountain to town. Your great-granddad shoveled up a rock about the size of his hand and brought it down once right between that bear's eyes. Right between. Old bear hit the ground like a chimney falling. Dead before it was down. Used to have the skin as a rug in your house until your mama got rid of it.”

“And we know this story,” I said, fingers intertwined, “how?”

“If you set one foot on that rug,” June piped up, “Conner would growl like a bear and then hit the thing in the head with his cane, like it was come back to life.”

“And he'd tell the story, word for word the same every time, about how he killed it.” Hek was grinning.

“He told you all this?” I leaned forward. “Conner told you?”

“Well, no,” Hek admitted. “We got it from your dad.”

“When you visited our house,” I said, pressing him.

They had not visited my house once in the several years I'd been back home, living there. I couldn't remember their ever coming over when I was a boy, either.

“Well, no,” June continued. “We got this mostly from your dad's show.”

My parents were itinerant entertainers, carnival performers. My father was a magician of some dexterity; Mother was his lovely assistant. They worked for the fabled Ten Show, a touring enterprise that featured the most bizarre combination of odd string-band music, startling freaks, and genuine magic ever assembled on the planet—at least according to the banners they always set up around the towns where they traveled. No one who saw the show went home unaffected, least of all me.

But I'd been twisted more, of course, by the perennial absence of my parents than by their cold professional occupation. My father dazzled onstage, told great intricate stories—mostly to distract the audience while he worked his tricks. My mother employed her sexual energies with the abandon of a flapper or the more liberated of the Pre-Raphaelite models, which is to say that her performances were as quaint as they were erotic: smoldering, enticing, and somehow from another time.

Together, my parents were mesmerizing on the boards.

But they were different people when they came backstage. Hidden, private souls came back to our house. My father barely spoke, and his eyes, though very kind, seemed never to see what was in front of them, but something in his mind instead. My mother was a libertine of epic proportions, and once, greatly drunk, undertook to describe to me the details of every back door in the county—because she knew every one by heart. It took all night. I was seven.

As much as the people of Blue Mountain loved the Ten Show and went to see it almost every time they could, they hated my mother and feared my father, though I could never put my finger on exactly why that was the case. Other men in our town were certainly strange, and my mother wasn't the only woman who had ever indulged in an affair.

“I see,” I told Hek and June after too long a silence. “Did my dad have other stories about Conner's kin in Wales? You said something about a phone call.”

“Surely did.” Hek finished his coffee and took a seat at the table. “When Conner died, your dad sent a letter to the family in the old country.”

“Hek told him to,” June whispered, as if it were a secret. She took her seat, as well.

“Sent a letter,” Hek repeated, “and got a phone call back. The kin over there wanted to know if it was money to be had.”

“If Conner had left them anything in his will,” June explained. “There was this one man who was a college professor, like you, and he—”

“I can tell you,” Hek interrupted June the way he always did, “that it made your daddy plenty mad, the way those people carried on after Conner's death.”

“According to what your father always said after that,” June explained, “the Welsh are no-account. To a man. They work in coal mines and all they want is a free handout.”

“They are a strange lot.” Hek nodded slowly.

I considered how likely it was that everyone in the world thought of their own home as the norm and the rest of the world as at least a bit off-kilter. There was no doubt that the residents of Blue Mountain felt they were the model of humanity; the rest of the population would be well served by the realization of that fact. I was also secure in the suspicion that people in any small town in Wales felt exactly the same about themselves. An inability to see past that basic myopia was, I had always thought, the primary reason for 98 percent of the misery in the world.

“I'll tell you what's strange,” I countered. “The fact that someone calls me out of the blue about this artifact, and it turns out I may have an intimate connection with it.”

“That is quite a coincidence,” Hek agreed.

“You say his name was Shultz,” June said. “The man who called you.”

“Right.”

“And how much do you know about him?” Hek finally made eye contact.

“What?” I was a little taken aback, looking right into his eyes. It didn't happen that often.

“Seems to me, Fever,” he said, as if I were an idiot, “that Mr. Shultz could have already known the coin had something to do with your great-grandfather, and that he called you for a completely different reason than you think.”

All the way home, I tried to imagine Shultz as a devious criminal with some great crime in the offing, but it didn't quite pan out. Hek, like most in Blue Mountain, operated out of the “never trust a stranger” motif. It was part of the general attitude of suspicion about most of the world.

And it was clear to me that neither Hek nor June would reveal the rest of what they knew about the coin. Even if I
had
destroyed their kitchen with a sledgehammer. Once a secret's locked in the rib cage of anyone I know in my little town, it's there for good.

So it was a quick good-bye and a dark road home for me, worrying about the things I
hadn't
been told.

Rain made things worse. It fell in silver stems, less translucent than water should be. All color was obviated. A dynasty of gray conquered the horizon. The buzz and hum of it on the roof and road conquered every other sound: Anything too soft could never be heard; anything too loud would be kin to the clatter. Thunder's will was dispersed; no bird would call across the indefinable sky. Each raindrop blasted the ground, an explosion of wet earth. Each shaken, blinding stab of lightning accomplished that same destruction in the air.

Finally, it came to me why rain had made it seem unlikely that anyone in Blue Mountain could have known about Shultz's coin. Rain is a perfect curtain. It hides sound and sight, and when it's done, it draws aside, allows the sunlight back. But rain does the same thing to the mind that it does to the sky. It obscures; it fogs. It robs the color and distracts the eye until nothing seems plausible, nothing seems clear.

But the rain had subsided to a drizzle by the time I pulled my truck up to the house.

Andrews appeared on the porch, holding a notepad, before I'd turned off the engine.

“About time,” he called.

I climbed out of the truck and stepped quickly to the porch.

“While you've been out uselessly doing whatever it is you so uselessly do,” he told me, “Dr. Shultz and I have been finding out everything you need to know.”

“Everything I need to know,” I repeated, voice dry. “Then the notepad you so vigorously hold is, we assume, only an outline.”

“What?” He looked up. “‘Outline'?”

“Turn to the page that explains quantum mechanics, then. I've been needing to know about that for quite a while.”

“About the
thing.
” He grimaced. “You really can take the fun out of helping you.”

“You've found out something about the coin.”

“We've found out
everything
about the coin. Mission accomplished. Fait accompli.”

“Is Shultz packing, then?”

“Packing? No. I mean we just found out, you know, where this thing came from, not how it got here or who sold it. Damn it, you really can take the fun—”

“Shultz is still in there, then?” I headed for the front door.

“Of course.” His voice dropped all of its remaining joviality.

“Shultz,” I called, “have you got a second?”

“What is it?” Andrews followed me into the darkened living room.

“Wait.” Shultz floundered on the sofa, shoes off, where he had fallen asleep. “Who's that?”

“Why did you call me?” I asked.

“What did he say?” Shultz glared at Andrews, who stood just behind me, still flourishing his notepad.

“He said—”

“I mean,” Shultz interrupted. “I know what he said, but why did he say it? What does it mean?”

“How did you come to call me about your coin?”

“I told you,” he said, a bit of irritation creeping into his voice. “I got in touch with the university and they gave me your name.”

I turned to Andrews.

“If you had a valuable coin, or one you thought might be worth something, where would you go?”

“Me?” Andrews scowled. “I guess I'd find some antique-coin guy.”

“Right,” I agreed. “If you were looking for a pompous opinion about something that didn't matter, you'd call a university. If you wanted information you could actually use in what we would laughingly refer to as ‘the real world,' you'd call some
guy.
”

“I did.” Shultz managed his way to a sitting position. “Remember I told you I talked to a silver collector? I mean, Jesus! I even made long-distance calls, overseas, because the jewelry guy said it was European. But everybody I talked to, they just told me the facts. Had no idea what the
story
was. It's the story that makes a doodad really mean something, don't you think?”

I exhaled.

“He did tell me that he took it to a guy at a jewelry store,” I told Andrews over my shoulder.

“And the story is, in fact, what makes a doodad interesting,” Andrews replied. “You've always said so yourself.”

“What's going on?” Shultz finally had his stocking feet on the floor, rubbing his eyes.

I exhaled.

“Nothing.” I gave him a bit of a raised eyebrow. “My friends are suspicious of you. But they're suspicious of everyone, so I'm—”

“You're uncomfortable that you invited me into your house.” Shultz sniffed.

“Probably right,” Andrews chimed in. “It's completely uncharacteristic of him to do it.

“And I suppose it could seem strange of me to accept.” Shultz sat back on the sofa. “But that's the kind of person I am: jump at a free trip to the mountains.”

“So. What did you two find out?” I was trying to change the subject. “Andrews said you'd made progress.”

“Oh, well,
there's
something.” Shultz was back to being unbelievably affable. “This thing, the coin, was almost certainly minted in Aberystwyth, or however you pronounce it, in Wales. There was a place, during the 1630s, solely for the purpose of coining locally mined silver. It was owned by a family called Briarwood, who were also owners of the most profitable silver mine in Wales at the time.”

“I was right.” Andrews beamed. “I found out about the mint in a book, I did a bit of the old Internet research, and I got the real stuff. Case closed.”

“‘The real stuff'?” I stared.

“What the hell do you think is on the back of the coin, Dr. Igmo?” Andrews shook his head.

“The giant
B,
” Shultz answered, leaning forward on the sofa, barely able to contain himself. “For Briarwood!”

“Yes. Why does that name sound familiar to me?” Andrews returned my stare.

“Well,” I began cautiously, “that's just the thing.”

To my dismay, I found myself thinking exactly what Hek and June must have thought when they were talking to me: How much should I reveal, and how much should I hide?

Andrews, somewhat unfortunately, read my face.

“Hang on,” he mumbled, obviously scanning his brain.

I realized I was grinding my teeth; my jaw hurt.

“Don't break anything, Andrews.” I sighed. “I'll tell you why you know the name Briarwood.”

How much to show, how much to shadow? I tried to read Shultz's eyes, but they only seemed eager and innocent.

“Sit down, I think,” I instructed Andrews.

He took a seat on the sofa beside Shultz; I dropped into the ancient leather chair perpendicular to it.

“My great-grandfather, Conner,” I began.

“Oh my
God
!” Andrews had remembered.

“What is it?” Shultz was a fascinated adolescent.

“It's his
family
!” Andrews blurted out.

“
What's
his family?” Shultz shot a glance from Andrews to me and back.

“Conner was born in Wales,” I explained. “As a young man, he left his family, whom he always claimed were a cold lot, and traveled to Ireland. There he apprenticed himself to a silversmith named Jamison. Soon after, Conner had the misfortune of falling in love with a serving girl in the Jamison household. The girl, Molly, promised to marry Conner, but a short while later, she got a better offer from a rich lord. Conner happened on Molly and this other man and thought the man was taking advantage of Molly. He killed the man in a sword fight and was arrested for murder. Only technical flaws in his indictment—and a particularly observant judge who blamed Molly as much as Conner for the murder—set my great-grandfather free temporarily. Before the lawyers could revise the legal papers, Conner jumped a boat to America and settled here. To escape any trouble that might pursue him, he changed his last name to Devilin when he got here.”

“Something about, I kid you not, having the devil in him,” Andrews revealed.

“Wait.” Shultz leaned my way. “He changed his name to Devilin? What was it before?”

The questions seemed genuine. Shultz did not appear to know my original family name.

Andrews jumped in, unable to contain himself—or to wait for me to respond.

“It was Briarwood!”

 

The rain had stopped and the wind had come up. The temperature outside had dropped twenty degrees since morning.

Andrews had insisted on espresso before I told any of my Conner Briarwood stories. We were all on our third cup, sitting down in the darkened living room, when I began.

“A
bwbach,
” I told them, “is a goblin with a relatively sweet spirit, often responsible for good deeds in exchange for strong drink. A
bwbach
generally disapproves of abstinence in any fashion and enjoys nothing more than good ale, a clay pipe, and a seat close to the fire.”

“Here we go.” Shultz clapped his hands, delighted as a child.

“Don't encourage this,” Andrews warned, mock disdain dripping from his words.

“Conner always told a story of his departure from Wales,” I went on, ignoring them both, “that included a
bwbach.
He said he was walking across a field toward a waterfall for a drink when something tapped him on his shoulder. He turned around and saw himself: A man his mirror image stared back at him. The man grinned and said, ‘Have a cup!' and handed Conner a bit of ale. Conner declined because he was a Calvinist and would not touch alcohol. ‘Then have you a pipe!' the doppelganger charged Conner. But Conner did not care for tobacco, even as a young man. ‘Well at least you can shake my hand!' the man demanded. Conner offered his hand; the thing took it but then let it go immediately. ‘Cold as ice!' it pronounced. ‘I must ask you to get out of my country. You're no fit Welshman!' At that, the man returned to his natural form, a grinning wraith with barely human features. Conner nodded and left his native land at sunrise on the very next day.”

“Did he really?” Shultz asked Andrews, voice hushed.

“He did,” I answered. “Though his exodus probably had more to do with the fact that his mother was dead and his father had little use for him.”

“But that's the story he told?” Andrews wanted to know.

“Always. And when I began to study folk stories as an adult, I came to realize just how significant a bit of psychology it was that Conner faced himself—the form of a spirit that looked like him—in order to leave home. He seemed to be telling himself that if he stayed in Wales, he'd become nothing more than a hot-blooded drunk, sit around the fire smoking, and never amount to anything.”

“That's what that story means?” Shultz sat back on the couch.

“So he went to Ireland and killed a man instead.” Andrews's arch voice insulted the air. “Then fled to America.”

“This just gets better and better.” Shultz was completely awake now and clearly overtaken by the turn of events.

His hair was a mess, his eyes sparkled; a grin seemed to defy the constraints of his facial muscles. In that instant, I couldn't imagine why I had ever suspected him of anything more than overeating.

“This is all new to you,” I said to him softly.

“As a two-day pup,” he shot back happily.

I wasn't completely ready to give over to him, but I wasn't going to be calling the police about him, either.

Andrews slumped down, and his voice warmed.

“I begin to see why you're acting so strangely. It's quite a coincidence that a man you'd never heard of called you about a coin minted by your great-grandfather.”

“It wasn't minted by my great-grandfather,” I said patiently. “He didn't stay in Wales, he didn't take up the family business, and he was born sometime in the late 1800s. The coin's much older than that, I believe.”

“Based on what?” Andrews asked.

“Doesn't anybody believe me that I went to a jeweler in Atlanta?” Shultz shook his head. “The guy said it was old—took a guess at three hundred years.”

“And when were you going to tell us that?” Andrews scowled.

“I thought I did.” Shultz shrugged.

“The point is that the coin probably belonged to my great-grandfather. But it wasn't among his things, as far as I know, when he died.” I glanced at the kitchen window. The rain was starting up again.

“Do you have any other family around here?” Shultz asked. “Someone we could—”

“No. All dead.”

Andrews looked as if he might object to that statement, but Shultz went on.

“Would it be worth a call or something to Wales? Are there still Briarwoods there?”

“There are.” I nodded. “I don't know any of them, not remotely. But Hek and June told me they called my father when Conner died.”

“Heck and who?” Shultz's grin got bigger.

“Hezekiah and June Cotage,” I told him. “A couple of my primary folk informants.”

“And his spiritual parents,” Andrews added, teasing.

“Not quite that,” I objected. “But I am close to them. I've just come from their home.”

“Should have known that's where you'd go first.” Andrews nodded sagely.

“And they told you…,” Shultz said slowly.

“That as of the mid-1970s, the family in Wales still wanted to know about Conner's death. Or about his will, actually.”